Grade 1 Teeth on the Loose!

First graders' mouths are full of loose teeth, so I do a lesson on the topic. First we read one fiction and one nonfiction book about loose teeth. Then students wrote down one fact they learned. Here are some of them:

• Kids have 20 teeth. 
• Grownups have 32 teeth.
• Roots hold your teeth in your mouth.
• The top of your tooth is called the crown.

Finally, the kids each placed a tooth on a chart showing how many teeth they've lost so far. Can you use it to answer the questions below?

• How many kids haven't lost any teeth yet?
• What is the most common number of lost teeth?
• Have more kids lost a total of 1 tooth or a total or 5 teeth?

Grade 3 FICtion

Third graders now get to take out books from anywhere in the library ... but they're not sure how to find what they want. So we'll be learning how to use the online catalog and convert call number listings into shelf locations.

We started simple, with the fiction section. Every fiction call number has "FIC" as the first line, and then the first three letters of the author's last name as the second line.

For example, if I wrote a book, the call number would be

FIC
MOO

What would YOUR call number be?

Students figured out the call numbers for a list of books and and then created their very own for a fiction book they "wrote." Here are some of their book covers:

Grade 4 Dewey Matching Game

As a follow-up to our last lesson, when fourth-graders figured out Dewey Decimal System categories, this week they assigned a stack of topics to those categories. Each table got a set of "playing cards" that they had to place in the correct area of their "game board." (Many thanks to my sixth-grade volunteers for cutting the cards out!)

Some of the cards were kind of tricky ... you could make the case for a certain subject to be in more than one Dewey category. So long as the students could explain their thinking, they got full credit. Here are the teams at work:

Boney Research - Room 4

Second graders took notes for the first time in library, listening to Dem Bones by Bob Barner and learning such information as:

• Where is your patella? 
• How many vertebrae are in your spine? 
• Where is your clavicle? 
• How many bones are in your foot? 
• Which bone is the longest? 

Then we created a list of questions they had about bones and practiced using a table of contents to find the answers. Here are some of the facts they learned:

• A muscle is attached to a bone by a tendon. 
• Bones are made of water and calcium. 
• Broken bones can heal themselves, but they can't move during the process.
• Joints have different names. One kind is a ball and socket.

And here they are at work:

If you'd like to know more about bone names, the Animaniacs can tell you:

Three of These Things with Room 2

We talked about sorting and categories in first grade, since the students are learning how the library is set up so they can choose their own books. After sorting some objects, we watched this classic video:

Then the students created their own "Three of These Things" game board. After viewing their creations below, you can play an online game to see how good you are at figuring out what is different. The link is at the end of this post.

Click here to play the game.